Real-estate developers are not popular with most of the American public. A recent Stanford paper found that people like developers only slightly more than they like corporate executives. Many progressives object to developers’ business model, which depends on building new units and charging as much as possible for them, even if that makes them unaffordable for longtime residents.

But there are signs that this adversarial relationship is starting to give way to a more cooperative dynamic. In cities across the country, some residents that might once have protested new construction are welcoming developers, pushing governments to allow them to build more and more housing. “You can work to dismantle the system without demonizing developers,” Laura Loe, a Seattle housing advocate, told me. With more housing, the thinking goes, the cost of rent in thriving cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Portland will not rise so quickly, which will allow more people from different economic backgrounds to live there and share in the prosperity of the local economy.

This type of thinking is the centerpiece of a progressivist movement called YIMBYism—referring to an abbreviation of “Yes In My Backyard”—which is increasingly notching successes in big cities. YIMBYs are a pointed contrast to NIMBYs, who are named for the phrase “Not In My Backyard,” a derogative term for people who oppose development. This opposition grew, in many places, from a desire to keep populations down and property values up, but also as a way to perpetuate housing segregation. The developments that many didn’t want in their backyards were housing complexes that would have brought poor and minority families into more-affluent areas, in hopes of giving them access to better schools, jobs, and opportunities.

Related Story

Look around, and YIMBYs are a growing presence. There’s a YIMBY group in Somerville, Massachusetts, and one in Los Angeles; there’s a San Francisco YIMBY party and a YIMBY group in Portland. YIMBYtown, a national conference, will take place in Oakland this month; Helsinki is hosting Yimbycon in August.

“We’re saying yes to opportunity, in contrast to the gloom-and-doom negativity of NIMBY,” says Jesse Kanson-Benanav, who is the chair of A Better Cambridge, an advocacy group that works to get more housing built in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and who will be attending YIMBYtown along with a handful of other Boston organizers. A Better Cambridge, which was founded in 2012 to advocate for more housing, pushed back against concerns from the community about noise, height, and traffic. Kanson-Benanav’s group was instrumental in getting a 19-story development approved in Cambridge’s Central Square this year. “There’s now a pro-housing, pro-density constituency in Cambridge that hadn’t been at the table previously,” he told me.

Similar groups have seen successes in other cities. In Colorado, Boulder Forward, a YIMBY group that organized the inaugural YIMBYtown conference last year, organized opposition to a ballot measure that would have restricted growth in town. Residents voted down the ballot initiatives by a 2-to-1 margin. And in Berkeley, East Bay Forward, a YIMBY group, protested at a city-council meeting at which downzoning—a change to zoning policy that would restrict the amount of housing that could be built—was on the agenda. The city council decided not to consider the measure at that meeting, which the YIMBYs considered a victory.

These housing advocates have fine-tuned their message as they’ve gained momentum. Many of them do not make a point of emphasizing that building housing increases affordability. What has been more successful, YIMBY groups are recognizing, is appealing to people’s sense of equity and fairness. Economic mobility is stunted throughout much of the country, and one reason for this is that low-income people can’t afford to live in high-opportunity cities such as San Francisco and New York. Taking pressure off of housing prices by building more units is one way to open up cities’ economies to more people.

“I think there are more people understanding housing as a social-justice issue,” Gabriel Metcalf, the president and CEO of SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, told me. “While they might not like their communities changing with higher-density buildings, more people understand that they are necessary to live up to our values as progressives.”

There’s no doubt that affordability is an issue in some of the country’s biggest metropolitan areas. But talking about affordability isn’t necessarily what gets people to support building more housing, and research backs up this approach that many YIMBYs take. In a recent working paper, Clayton Nall, a professor of political science at Stanford, and William Marble, a graduate student there, found that most people are ambivalent when they’re told that developments will reduce the cost of housing. In some cases, if they’re homeowners, such information will make them less likely to support development, likely because they think the values of their own properties will go down.

But there’s a group of people who will support housing developments if they’re reminded of the redistributive effects of such construction. There’s a high correlation, Nall told me, between people who believe in taxing the rich and those who believe in providing housing for all. “An economically progressive message tied with a pro-development message can potentially ameliorate the concerns of liberal homeowners,” Nall said.

The idea of wealth redistribution was what helped convert Loe, the Seattle YIMBY, to the cause. She was raised by two art historians, she told me, who emphasized the importance of historic preservation, and so she used to support restrictions on building. She used to want to “wage a proxy war on capitalism,” she told me, by not letting builders build. Loe was the campaign manager for a Seattle city-council candidate who opposed development, and as she knocked on doors during the campaign, she met a number of NIMBYs who didn’t want their neighborhoods to be more diverse. It slowly dawned on Loe, who had been a member of the Green Party for 20 years, that building more housing was the way to make Seattle more equitable. “White homeowners have had so many advantages and subsidies and tax breaks—there’s a fairness issue there,” she said. “It’s about sharing the city.”

Many housing advocates echo this idea of sharing, and say that’s why they’ve gotten involved in the YIMBY movement. Some say the election of Trump has also helped spur interest in their cause. Sonja Trauss, who founded the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) in 2013, told me that her group’s most well attended meeting occurred right after the election. “Man, did we have a surge in interest for getting involved in politics after the election,” she said. Generally, she says she’s seeing more groups like hers in the Bay Area, and now some elected officials will disparage NIMBYism in a way they didn’t before. “It seems like the tide has turned,” she said. Laura Foote Clark formally started the group YIMBY Action six months before the November elections. Membership in the Bay Area group has doubled since the election, she told me. “We definitely got the initial Trump bump—people being like, ‘Oh my God, the world is ending, we have to do something,’” she told me.

Few places have seen more of a surge in pro-building sentiment than the Bay Area, where development has traditionally been hampered by objections from neighbors concerned with the downsides of density. Silicon Valley added about 344,000 residents between 2007 and 2016, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, but only 69,503 units were issued building permits in that time. (Levy calculates that 130,094 units of new housing would have been needed to keep pace with population growth.)

Some people in the Bay Area are changing their minds about developers, Clark, of YIMBY Action, told me. More and more of them are affected by rising housing prices, and so are becoming aware of the problem of a lack of inventory. Others are increasingly realizing their children won’t be able to afford to live close by. “It is no longer just low-income folks who are housing-burdened—it’s now moved well up the ladder,” Levy said.

With a growing Bay Area pro-housing lobby have come victories for the movement. In May, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law called Home SF, which allows developers to build taller buildings and more units if they include affordable units in the project. (A prior version of the same housing law had died last year after an anti-development protest at which one housing activist decried the proposal as “ethnic cleansing.”) Libby Schaaf, the mayor of Oakland, recently appointed an executive at a real-estate firm to the city’s seven-member planning commission, and last year released a plan to build 17,000 more units in the city. Facebook is working with the city council of Menlo Park, where the company is based, to build 1,500 housing units for the general public. In March, the majority of speakers at a Sunnyvale Planning Commission meeting were pro-housing, which would have been unheard of just a few years ago, Jason Uhlenkott, the co-director of SouthBayYIMBY, told me. “There’s a lot of evidence that voters who want more housing are turning out in large numbers,” he said.

Perhaps the biggest change has come in the city of Mountain View, home to Google, which is located in the heart of the traditionally NIMBY Silicon Valley. The city is planning 9,850 new units near Google’s campus, and wants to increase its housing stock of 36,000 by 50 percent in coming years, according to Lenny Siegel, a member of Mountain View’s city council. In 2014, nine candidates ran for city council, and the pro-housing candidates, including Siegel, came in first, second, third, and fifth, he told me.

“There’s this great sense that housing is a problem, not just for employers, but for the fabric of our community,” Siegel told me. Siegel said that liberals like him have to make peace with developers. When he was running for office, a developer offered to donate to his campaign, and his wife urged him to turn the donation down. Now, he takes meetings with developers in his living room. “If we want housing, we have to work with developers,” he told me. “I don’t like their business model at all, but in some ways I’m their best ally because I want to build housing.”

Of course, the rise of YIMBY sentiment doesn’t mean that opposition to construction has disappeared. Throughout the Bay Area, and the country, there’s still significant resistance to building housing in many expensive communities. For example, a May meeting in Menlo Park over a proposal to build 150 affordable housing units was met with typical NIMBYism. Housing "is not affordable in this whole Peninsula. To expect one little piece of Menlo Park to be responsible to correct that ... that's not fair,” one local resident toldThe Almanac, a local newspaper. But pro-housing advocates say that now, there are voices pushing back against the NIMBYs where there once were not—an important shift, given that most decisions about housing and planning are made at the local level.

And there are growing signs of divide within the pro-housing movement. As Henry Grabar wrote last month at Slate, some progressives are skeptical about San Francisco YIMBYs’ true aims. Left-leaning San Franciscans have called YIMBY advocacy “a libertarian, anti-poor campaign,” and the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America recently protested a YIMBY panel in San Francisco, calling the organization “pro-gentrification.”

Not everyone who currently opposes development has these reactions, but convincing people to support housing and equality in general is easier than getting them to back a project that’s going up across the street from them. The work of Nall, the Stanford professor, shows that people who say they are in favor of development get skittish when they’re asked about specific proposals, especially ones in their communities.

Even Siegel, the pro-housing city-council member in Mountain View, qualifies his success in getting more units built. His coalition won support from the community for a plan to build the 10,000 or so units in an area called North Bayshore because that area isn’t near many homes in the community—it is currently home to an office park. Voters might have been more resistant if the project were to be more entwined in the community. He found success, he says, by tweaking the pro-development message from “Yes In My Backyard” to “Yes, In Your Backyard.” It may not be a progressive rallying cry, but it is getting people to support building more housing units, he said, so it’s a start.

About the Author

Most Popular

The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.

Recognizing that Americans are not the future of his religion, the late preacher embraced “the black world, the white world, the yellow world, the rich world, the poor world.”

Billy Graham, who died Wednesday at the age of 99, may have been “America’s Pastor,” but he was also a man of the world. From the early days of his ministry, when he visited U.S. military forces in Korea, to his quiet message of healing at Washington Cathedral in the aftermath of September 11, Graham was a frequent commentator on—and participant in—global politics. He used his status as the most important American religious figure of the 20th century to help lead American evangelicals into a more robust engagement with the rest of the world. He was also an institution builder who was deeply invested in Christianity as a global faith.

There were other people who taught more missionaries, and some who reached more people on television; there were even those whose preaching events rivaled Graham’s in size. But no one else did as much to turn evangelicalism into an international movement that could stand alongside—and ultimately challenge—both the Vatican and the liberal World Council of Churches for the mantle of global Christian leadership.